Touch

by Courtney Maum

It was fashionable back then to say that talent could be learned: that good writing could come from grit and steady work. Maybe this was true. But instinct? You either had it or you didn’t.

All these openings for closeness—all these humans with their disappointments and their desperate hearts, but it’s so much easier, so convenient, to blame

her mother’s house (and her mother’s furniture) bore the stretch marks of a life actually lived.

Jodi waved Sloane around to where she was standing and pulled her to her bosom, which it really was. Some people have chests. The lonely ones have torsos. Jodi had a port. Her embrace was familiar and transformative. She smelled like a Salvation Army couch completely stuffed with lavender, and the effect was curiously settling, like the times that Sloane had hid behind clothes racks as a child, accompanying her mother on errands,

“What if it wasn’t an app? What else could it be?” Sloane watched eleven faces fall. People looked at one another uncomfortably, waiting for someone else to speak. After a disheartening lag, Jarod spoke up again. “Well then,” he said, shrugging. “That would just be life.” Everyone remained quiet, so Jarod shrugged again. “And no one would buy that.”

She knew that things went viral, knew how things went viral, but she’d never been a part of the virality herself. It was indeed a sickness, quickly come upon her. All she wanted to do was fall to the ground.

She was focusing so steadily she could actually see the world inside her mind. Rubber sheets and paper airplanes and the aging of the loved. Borrowed sweatshirts, unwashed sheets, a candy wrapper in the grass. A hissing teapot, steaming. The herringbone pattern of her own aging skin. Her sister, body shambling, mind praying, on a hospital bed. “What I’m thinking is that you can take this ReProduction summit and stick it up your ass.” She